We had moved once more, to a rundown rented house on the quadrado, the village square, where we lived until our own house was ready. In our new lodgings the roof leaked so badly that whenever it rained at night, we had to drag the straw mats we slept on from one corner of our quarters to another until we found a dry spot. Behind the house stood a big wooden table and an earthen wood fire stove, so I started to cook and sell food to the tourists in the evenings.    
         
   
   
   
a friend had given Rashid a rooster and a hen, and soon the first chicks hatched
    
         
   

Living conditions were very basic in Trancoso. The single publicly available phone, housed in a small wooden shack, was closed half the time due to its owner not paying the bills. There was no post office or even a letter box, and not one newsstand in the whole place, not to mention other commonplace facilities like a barber shop or a petrol pump.

   
    The butcher's place was a small wooden table in front of a tree, with the slaughtered animal hanging from one of its branches. Chunks of meat were roughly cut or hacked off on demand; there only were two qualities availible: first or second.    
    Having brought my cooking books along, one day I wanted to prepare a dish requiring a certain type of beef meat. Now that book had many photos showing all the different pieces of beef. Not being familiar with the correct Portuguese expression for what I needed, I took my book along and showed the picture to the butcher. He looked at the photos for quite a while, than handed the book back to me, announcing gravely that the pictures surely showed the meat of some type of bird!    
         
    There was neither a pharmacy nor a doctor in the village. When a kid fell ill, it got carried to the house of some person known for the ability to "pray" the sickness away. My own kids did undergo this treatment several times. Another option were those among the elderly neighbors well versed in the lore of herbs and potions. They always managed to rustle up a handful of the right leaves to brew a tea that would give the patient some relief.    
         
    One morning a young neighbor entered our place dragging a Brazilian tourist girl along. She surprised me by asking me to squeeze a few drops of milk from my breast onto a spoon. After mixing the milk with the juice of mastruz, a powerful medicinal plant employed to cure many ailments, the neighbor girl infused the resulting compound into her companion's infected ear. Alternately, local medicine employed some rather unwholesome ingredients as crushed cockroaches as well. Whenever Ahmed, my youngest born in our second year in Brazil, had some eye infection, I had him pee a few drops into my hand and than applied the urine to his eyes. Worked fine. When one of the kids came down with a fever, I applied raw potato slices or onion rings to their foreheads.    
         
    In emergencies, the lack of any medical facilities posed a real problem. To Porto Seguro, the next small town it was only like 20 km., but due to adverse road conditions it took the bus 1½ hours to get there. Sometimes in bad weather the bus couldn't even pass at all or got stuck on the way. In our first year in Trancoso, there only was one daily bus to Porto Seguro and back, and none to anywhere else.    
         
   
   
   
Fatima the cycle acrobat, with our half finished house as a backdrop
    
         
    One night we had a bit of a party celebrating somebody's birthday when a neighbor burst in, telling us a man was severely wounded from being shot at and our jeep, bought around the time we started constructing, was needed to transport him to the hospital in Porto Seguro immediately. We complied, but the unfortunate fellow died in the car long before reaching town. It was such a stupid, unnecessary death.    
         
   

As transpired later, the guy who had died and his adversary both were no natives of Trancoso. The victim, a known partygoer and drinker, came from São Paulo, while his killer, who worked as a bus driver, came from another state. It was on the bus driven by the latter where their argument started. Members of two local families, at war about a piece of land, happened to find themselves on the same bus and started to loudly continue their dispute during the ride. Feuds like this are very common in Trancoso, usually dating back to some unproven, undocumented verbal agreements by long dead forebears.

    
    Somehow both the bus driver and the paulista got drawn into the argument that actually was the business of neither of the two. By the time the bus reached its destination, both men were so worked up that hardly an hour later the bus driver went up to the bar where his opponent was drinking, called him out and shot him. He left the village and its vicinity right after the murder and was never again heard of.    
         
    One of the things I admittedly didn't care for in our newly adopted home country was not being able to walk a few paces without having to exchange the customary three kisses with people I hardly knew. That exaggerated kissing business wasn't even a local custom actually, but one imported from the southern states.    
    Something else I needed time to adapt to after having lived in countries where women customarily wear ankle-lengths habits were scantily-clad females. One of my first day impressions of Brazil is that of seeing a woman with shorts so tight and small some of her pubic hair spilled out right in the center of some small southern town we passed through.    
    String-tanga clad Cariocas and Paulistas would cross Trancoso's village square on their way back from the beach. And by no means gracile Latin beauties all of them, mind, but as often real heavyweights. For somebody who'd just arrived from Nepal and India, such sights were very strange indeed.    
         
   
   
   
Rashid with a little girlfriend
   
         
    We didn't get on well with the German guy whom we knew from Nepal, the one who'd initially told us about Trancoso. Tall and thin, with long reddish-blonde hair and always dressed in white, he soon got a fitting nickname by the locals, who started to call him "Aspargo", asparagus. He was rather mad and heavily into coke, and, first having insisted on lending us some money, tried to force us to pay him totally exaggerated interest on it. We had a few heavy quarrels, and stopped to associate with him. He still kept turning up to state his outrageous demands, so we gave him back what we owned him as soon as possible.    
    Aspargo actually tried to kill my erstwhile husband by running him over with his car, right on the village square, in full sight of dozens of onlookers. But his intended victim managed to turn the tables on him by jumping onto the hood of the approaching vehicle and shattering its windshield with one powerful kick. The crazy German, unable to control his car with the splintered glass obstructing his view, drove straight into an electric lamp post. This was to cost him a good amount of money, as the lamp post broke off at its base and had to be replaced. It also cost him any respect the locals still had for him.    
    My erstwhile husband, hardly less of a psycho than his opponent, was hailed by the village youths as some kind of a super hero, a reputation that helped him get away with any amount of bad behavior for years to come.    
         
   
   
   
 exploring the beach
    
         
    One of my rare visits to the beach, right at the beginning of our Brazilian times. I sure went down there less than a dozen times in all of my four years in Trancoso.